Surgery Is Open.
What glorious weather. I haven’t felt quite this warm and lazily content since I was in Jersey last year, which is perhaps just a trick of the light because who’s that standing by the lift with her phone to her ear but Xanthe Hamilton, creator and director of the Branchage Film Festival, Jersey’s more civilised answer to Woodstock…
However, whilst there is something of the Dryad about her, stumbling into her in the late sunshine is no piece of early summer magic. Our paths crossed last night because it was the first of a series of monthly Branchage Film Surgeries, appropriately enough held at the Hospital club in Covent Garden.
The idea of the Surgery is simply that filmmakers with unfinished short films screen them and then a panel film doctors try and help them see what works and what doesn’t and where they should go next. The first time we did it was at Branchage last year in the even more baroque setting of the Speigel Tent and now we are back by popular demand to offer advice to filmmakers once a month at the Hospital…
This month we discussed the short documentary “Run, Granpa Run” by Paul Griffiths, “Harmonica Swing” by Amiram Bukowski, “Myth” by Georges Sokol and “One Minute Guide To Planet Earth” by Armen Antranikian. All were flawed, of course, you don’t come to the Surgery if everything is ok, but all were ambitious, thought provoking and fascinating. It is a rare opportunity to see films as a work in progress and a rarer one to get a chance to really discuss what goes wrong in an open and constructive manner.
Also though friendly and small the audience held a surprising number of influential people and the chance to show your work to them as raw potential rather than a finished item is not to be sniffed at – even if Colonel Mullighan’s command that we all dress “with a little Branchage ‘flair’” meant that we ended up looking like the cast of a modern dress “Midsummer’s Night Dream”. Philip Ilson clearly Puckish in his striped blazer (a remarkable item of second hand clothing which apparently has been recognised not only by alumni of the obscure Suffolk school whose uniform it is, but by one who was actually there at the same time as the man whose name tag it still carries…) Hannah Patterson Helena tall, James Mullighan cutting a rakeish shape as a moustached Oberon and with Jenny, Helen and Rosie with her glittery eye make-up as shoe-ins for the fairys.
Which probably leaves me as Bottom, braying my donkey thoughts in the corner… happy days.